Taken on it's own, in a vacuum, I'd agree. But the problem is that the entire gaming industry is based on selling an unfinished product and patching it later. Many times with a "roadmap" that lasts a year or more before the game is actually out of beta and in a finished state.Originally Posted by CategoryTheory Go to original post
In that regard I don't think it's at all unfair to judge a game based on what's available to view at the time. Chances are even that the game may not ever get any better.
Judging a game based on actually playing it is fine. Judging something you've not yet played by looking at (not even playing!) in-development code with behaviour that you might never even see in the future game is not likely to be helpful at all.Originally Posted by Sircowdog1 Go to original post
And if you were developing a product, would you want to run the risk of an "X is terrible" Internet brouhaha when you don't even know if you'll ever be selling X? What's the upside there?
I read one person's supposition on the nature of Heartland in that it will be simply a port of Survival from Div 1 to Div 2 to give players a proper PvP experience that they have wanted from the first. Did Survival involve weapon/gear extraction? He noticed a graphic of a flare gun in the Heartland reveal image.
I have no interest in a PvP game like that or BR. But, to each his or her own.
Well....the problem is that there's been some adulteration of what the terms "alpha" and "beta" mean. Especially beta. These days it's not really anything more than a PR event/demo to let streamers advertise your product. 99 times out of 100 what you see in a beta is what the game is shipping with, sans extremely minor cosmetic or UI features.Originally Posted by CategoryTheory Go to original post
And if a developer/publisher does that, they get what they deserve. If their product isn't ready, they shouldn't be taking the risk of using the free advertising of influencers. I have zero sympathy for the practice.
Div 1 Survival did involve extracting your gear from a "Dark Zone" portion of the map, but the PvE version did not have PvP enabled. The eurogamer article mentioned that Heartland has PvP and PvE modes. How those play out remains to be seen as things may change from what is currently being play tested.Originally Posted by hralex1951 Go to original post
This argument is not applicable to Heartland where people needed to sign a NDA to participate in an "early play test".Originally Posted by Sircowdog1 Go to original post
If you look at the Wikipedia definition of beta they say that the software is "feature complete but but likely to contain a number of known or unknown bugs." The actual quality of the software at this stage is actually much more dependent on the development process than any definition of "beta."Originally Posted by Sircowdog1 Go to original post
Back in the '90s when I was asked to implement something I'd hack out some code that seemed like it should work, ran it and poked at it for a bit, and if nothing obviously broken showed up I'd declare it done, at least for the moment. With a process like that, it's not unusual for major bugs to exist, or even features to be incomplete, at that point, and then show up in the beta, especially if my code is interacting with code written by someone else.
These days I (and many others, particlarly those doing what we call "agile" development) take an approach more worthy of the term "engineering" where I start by creating and checking a fairly detailed specification (even if in a relatively informal way), create a set of automated tests that will be run almost continuously from that point on, and characterise the behaviour of the code under various conditions, particularly in what error conditions would be, how it handles them, and how it interfaces with other code. This tends to produce much more robust code, and a beta coming out of well-executed process like this should have very few bugs: ideally it will be fine for release as-is. (If it's not, I not only fix the code, but go back and figure out what in my process let those particular problems through to beta and try to fix the process to prevent that kind of thing from happening again.)
If your process is like the second form above, and is working reasonably well, there's so little difference between "beta" and "release" that it's perfectly reasonable to use the beta for PR, previews, demos, and so on. And why wouldn't you?
Well, I agree with that, but I was originally talking about pre-beta material, and why you shouldn't publicise that when you know it's likely to change. The Internet (correctly or not) will get all over you for problems you may well be aware of and know are going to be fixed, and telling them that's the case won't generally help.And if a developer/publisher does that, they get what they deserve. If their product isn't ready, they shouldn't be taking the risk of using the free advertising of influencers. I have zero sympathy for the practice.